According to today’s report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is actively developing unreleased Mac mini configurations with generationally mismatched M6 and M5 Pro chips. However, no release timeframe has been specified yet. The Mac mini has been seeing even stronger demand for AI-related tasks and workloads, so much so that Apple even removed some memory/storage configurations for the machine.
Let’s talk about the Apple silicon that’s going to be on the next Mac mini. This won’t be the first time that we’ve seen generationally mismatched Apple silicon on any Mac’s iteration. When Apple updated the Mac Studio in March 2025, that pro desktop computer features M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips. There hasn’t been an M4 Ultra chip, and there never will be. Instead, Apple is actively developing the M5 Ultra chip for an unreleased Mac Studio.
Anyway, back to the Mac mini. Sometimes, Apple would introduce the Pro and Max chips several months after introducing the standard chip in a new generation of Apple silicon, but that won’t be the case here because, according to recent rumors, Apple is not planning to develop the M6 Pro and M6 Max chips. Instead, Apple is quickly moving on from the M6 generation to focus on making substantial AI performance improvements in the future M7 series of chips.
We would expect the next Mac mini to come out as soon as this fall, but with the ongoing memory chip shortages, we could see the launch pushed back a bit. Still, the Mac mini will provide plenty of punch in such a tiny form factor.
